Archive for September 2014

The director of the U.S. Secret Service offered an apology on Tuesday for security lapses that allowed a knife-wielding intruder to get into the White House through an unlocked door, down a hallway and into the East Room.

‘It is clear that our security plan was not executed properly,’ Secret Service Director Julia Pierson told lawmakers. ‘I take full responsibility; what happened is unacceptable and it will never happen again.’

But Congressman Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, excoriated Pierson for her agents lax attention as Gonzales gave himself ‘half of a White House tour’ while he ran.

Omar Gonzalez, a 42-year-old military veteran, got past five rings of security on September 19 after jumping a fence on the White House’s outer perimeter.

A deputy headmaster at a private school who was found dead at his home had used a hidden camera to secretly film footage of young male pupils getting changed, it was revealed today.

The body of Martin Goldberg, who worked at £10,600-a-year Thorpe Hall School in Great Wakering, Essex, was discovered hanged the day after police questioned him over allegations he had bought child pornorgraphy from abroad.

There was widespread shock at the school when the respected maths teacher died at his four-bedroom detached home in Shoeburyness.

But today – three weeks after his death on September 10 – Essex Police confirmed they had been investigating the 46-year-old man, who was single and lived alone at the £360,000 house.

However Nick Alston, Essex’s Police and Crime Commissioner, demanded to know why it took police nine months to investigate after first being tipped off about Mr Goldberg’s interest in naked young boys.

He said police in Canada – working on a child pornography investigation known as Project Spade – alerted colleagues in Essex in November 2013 after they traced the purchase of videos of boys back to Mr Goldberg.

They questioned him on September 9, but no arrest was made. Then he was found dead on September 10. Only after his death did detectives discover hundreds of images they believe came from a camera hidden inside a sports bag.

Police confirmed the camera had been used to film male children undressing in the school’s male changing rooms as well as in the changing rooms at a swimming pool and two other locations.

A new Government Accountability Institute (GAI) report reveals that President Barack Obama has attended only 42.1% of his daily intelligence briefings (known officially as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB) in the 2,079 days of his presidency through September 29, 2014.
The GAI report also included a breakdown of Obama’s PDB attendance record between terms; he attended 42.4% of his PDBs in his first term and 41.3% in his second.
The GAI’s alarming findings come on the heels of Obama’s 60 Minutes comments on Sunday, wherein the president laid the blame for the Islamic State’s (ISIS) rapid rise squarely at the feet of his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Grizzled comics veterans like me may remember a previous incarnation of the Guardians – an equally ill-assorted bunch from 3,000 years in the future trying to wrest the Galaxy from its alien conquerors – but the current line-up is a disparate bunch of characters created by the likes of Jim Starlin and Bill Mantlo back in the 1970s and ’80s and only brought together in recent years. Turning this motley crew into anything resembling a super-team is no easy matter; Guardians never lets you forget that its roster of reluctant heroes don’t even share cultural references or linguistic idioms, let alone a common purpose, and the film gets some great comic mileage out of things lost in translation or misunderstood. Drax doesn’t understand the notion of metaphor (“Nothing goes over my head. My reflexes are too fast. I would catch it”.), Rocket doesn’t know what a raccoon is, and Gamora has certainly never come across key Earth texts like Footloose or heard of Kevin Bacon. This lack of common cultural bonds – each character firmly believes that the others are either insane or imbecilic, and frequently says so – means they have to discover something they do share. In this case, it’s loss – of home, parents, identity – and it’s the forging of a common purpose that ultimately brings them together. In that sense, Guardians is a universal tale about the formation of a new family out of the ashes of dispossession – and thanks to the sharp script, direction and performances it’s charmingly told.

Over two decades, Haruo Nakajima stomped his way into history.
With the Toho film “Godzilla” in 1954, Nakajima became the first man to don the rubber suit of Japan’s most famous kaiju monster.

It all started with hime being presented the first script, which had “G Film” written on the cover.

“I figured I didn’t know exactly what to do,” the 85-year-old retired actor tells Josei Seven (Oct. 9), “but because my belief was to not be picky about work I was appreciative.”

Before shooting began, he visited Tokyo’s Ueno Park.

“At that time, there was an elephant from India called there called Indira and I observed how it walked,” Nakajima says.

Nakajima, who had already appeared in a number of Toho productions, including Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” observed that Indira lumbered around slowly by pressing the entire sole of its foot on the ground at once.

“So Godzilla’s style of walking came from an elephant,” he says.

For a week, he visited the zoo, paying attention to the arm movements of bears and how birds shifted their heads.

Filming began at the Toho studios in Tokyo over the summer. It took three months, and Nakajima was forced to cart around a suit that weighed roughly 100 kilograms.

“I put one foot in (the suit) at a time,” he says, “and then the staff zipped it up from behind.”

In an introduction to the series of essays, Foreign Affairs editors Gideon Rose and Jonathan Tepperman note how the rise of Tea Party sentiment in the United States and its equivalent in Europe comes as a result of increasing disenfranchisement with the political system.

According to the authors, this necessitates the need for political leaders to “co-opt and channel popular passions, addressing political outsiders’ legitimate grievances while bypassing their simplistic solutions.”

In other words, the threat posed by grass roots populism across the western world represents a major challenge to the existing world order embraced by the CFR and must be hijacked and misdirected in order to have its potency diffused.

The central essay which outlines the CFR’s perspective on the challenges posed by populism is entitled Pitchfork Politics: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy. Written by Yascha Mounk, the piece highlights how the rise of populism stems from the “diminished….ability of democratic governments to satisfy their citizens,” namely the “long term stagnation in living standards and deep crises of national identity.”

Mounk emphasizes how populist ideas should be entertained but that voters must be convinced “that the simple solutions offered up by the populists are bound to fail.”

He goes on to acknowledge how, “In countries across Europe, populists of all stripes have transformed domestic politics in recent decades and now threaten the very existence of the EU,” not merely because of economic difficulties in recent years but due to “a decline in living standards from one generation to the next and the perceived threat to national identity posed by immigration and the growth of supranational organizations.”

Noting how median household income in the United States is now lower than it was in 1989, Mounk recognizes how populism has emerged from a sense that the political establishment has failed the middle and lower classes, who are now uncertain about their financial future.

Mounk also identifies a sentiment shared by many Americans that the establishment is conspiring with minority groups in order to undermine and strangle their economic and political livelihoods, favoring policies that benefit minorities over the majority while censoring freedom of speech.

Young women today do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature

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Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.

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Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained campus grievance committees.

Too many young middleclass women, raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness. The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance and self-defense.

Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind.

The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.

Liberalism lacks a profound sense of evil — but so does conservatism these days, when evil is facilely projected onto a foreign host of rising political forces united only in their rejection of Western values. Nothing is more simplistic than the now rote use by politicians and pundits of the cartoonish label “bad guys” for jihadists, as if American foreign policy is a slapdash script for a cowboy movie.

Ray Rice’s Elevator Gate may be one of the worst scandals to happen in a long time, but it’s also making women more aware of the domestic violence threats that could be lurking around them. Could the man you met in line at Starbucks be dangerous? Is a hot temper a bad sign? Luckily, there are ways to tell if a guy might have an anger problem — even over dinner. They’re not all signs that you should bail right now, but they are a good heads up that you should be keeping an eye out for signs of verbal or physical abuse — before it’s too late.